


The Future is the Past, Recalibrated

by Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Cassian Andor-centric, Cross-Generational Friendship, Friendship, Gen, Not Canon Compliant, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-04 10:43:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18602908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome/pseuds/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome
Summary: Cassian can't save them all, but he can try. And maybe, just maybe, he'll be saved in return.





	The Future is the Past, Recalibrated

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Maidenjedi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maidenjedi/gifts).



Cassian can’t save them all and he knows that. It’s what he’s told himself for years now. For lifetimes. Ever since he’d woken in a cold unfamiliar medbay, lightyears and lifetimes away from… from everyone. At least, everyone who had mattered, in the end. Jyn. Kaytu. Bodhi… the names of all of those brave rebels who had made their last stand with him.

Or what should have been his last stand. Because he had gone to Scarif to retrieve the Death Star plans, yes. BUt he’d also gone in search of… of peace. Of redemption, perhaps.

Something he still searches for, even to this day. Because there is a new war now, just as dark, just as terrible as the one that had taken so much from him. But that war had not been the first to break Cassian’s heart. No, perhaps, he thinks, sometimes, that peace is as much of a dream as the word home has become.

But other times, when he hears the laughter of children running through what once was a remote Rebellion outpost, or sees the relief on the faces of the newest-arriving refugees, Cassian know that peace, like home, can exist, as long as one keeps fighting for it. 

And he has always been a fighter.

The Rebel station had once been dubbed Kessel-22 in coded communications. It sat on a moon on the edge of Huttspace, which meant it was just dangerous enough that it had been safe from the Imperials and now, the First Order. Different name, same cruelty, Cassian thinks. And he makes sure to tell the children that, when they all gather around him to listen to the tales of long-ago battles. 

Whenever it’s time to tell of the villains of the stories, Cassian tells the orphaned children who have gathered in a circle around his chair, “their names, their ranks, their supposed rightful claims to power? None of that matters. Evil is evil, by every and any name it tries to hid behind.”

It’s a lesson he hopes the children take to heart, though it pains him to have to teach it. He wishes they had more time for joy in their days. At least, Cassian consoles himself, they are still allowed to be children here, and not soldiers.

No matter how much some of them naively wish to be ones. 

“Put that down, Miss Tico,” Cassian says softly, running a hand through greying hair. 

The small child glares up at him, still holding onto to the hydrospanner. “I wanna help. In the repair bay!”

He shakes his head, but with a smile. The younger Tico sister is no less brave, nor less stubborn than her older sister, and also, with her big-missing-two-front-teeth smile, far more likely to charm an unsuspecting mechanic into a repair lesson. 

Cassian knows, because he’s fallen for that trick more than once. “You’re too little to be out there.”

“I’m as tall as Ruffy!”

“Ruffy?”

“R4-UD,” Rose chirps. “She said I can call her that. She likes the name.”

“You understand binary?” Cassian tilts his head, remembering a long-ago time, when he had not been much bigger than the girl in front of him. When he’d tagged along after his father, bundled up against the chill of Fest’s so-called summers, to learn about droid repairs.

“I’ve been learning,” she replies. “While Paige has flyin’ lessons.”

“From who?”

“Ruffy,” she says again, smiling, and reaching for the hydrospanner he’d taken from her. “I’m good. I can help!”

Cassian sighs, knowing this is a lost cause. She might be too young to take lessons in droid mechanics, if the galaxy was a different place. She might still have her parents, and a real home, if the galaxy was a different place. But this is the universe they live in; a dangerous, beautiful, terrifying one. A place where a child’s happiness is as fleeting as a snowflake caught in a hand. Because Cassian knows all too well the safety the Tico sisters, and the other children, enjoy here, could be destroyed any day. If the First Order found this outpost…

Well. Cassian won’t be the only one who’s been in the fight since he was six years old. 

“Rose?” He bends down, though it hurts, sending shockwaves of pain up his artificial leg and over his durasteel replacement hip. “Why do you like helping the mechanics?” He worries she’s not given enough attention by the other adults. That she doesn’t have friends. Maybe she needs a doll? Or a pet? He’s not sure. He was learning how to clean blaster rifles at her age, not playing with toys.

“Because I like fixin’ things,” she replies. 

It’s a good answer. “Well, then I suppose we should get to work.”

“We?” Her eyes go wide as he starts to walk, letting her tag along behind him. “I get to help YOU?”

Cassian had snapped at far too many people over the years, including a princess and at least five generals, that he didn’t need any help. But today, looking down at a small child who inherited a broken galaxy, all he could say was “Yes. I could use a hand today, I suppose.”

The weeks fly by. Rose proves herself an agile student and her mastery of Binary impresses Cassian. Most people don’t bother to learn more than the basics of the droid’s base language. But Rose not only learns it, she writes little songs in it. Sometimes, her songs have a melody that makes her cry, though she tries to hide it from him.

Sometimes, he lets her pretend she’s fooled him. But other times, he asks her why she’s sad. And Rose tells him, in shy whispers, of the family that she and Paige have lost. “She’s all i got now, Mister Andor. An’ I’m never gonna lose her. Never ever.”

It’s a stubborn determination that only hurts whatever scrap of his heart he has left these days. He’s an old man. He’s lost so much more than he ever thought possible. Loved and lost, grieved, and somehow, always found a way to keep going ahead. It’s this knowledge, he realizes, he needs to pass to her, more than any welding position or droid-programing trick. “You cannot truly lose what you love.”

Her lips purse. “Nu-uh. They’re gone. I… I…”

The tears break from her eyes and spill over her cheeks. Cassian drops to a knee and embraces the child, the way his father used to hold him. Tight, like he could save her from everything. Gently, like she’s the most fragile thing in the world. And just like that, his own words fly away, his memories filling with the past, with a language he never speaks anymore, not even in his dreams. 

When he finally finds their shared language again, he takes a shaky breath. “We are all made of stars,” he promises her. “We are the light of the galaxy, and lights last forever.”

It’s what they told him, when his father was killed by a clone trooper’s blaster. It’s what they told him, when his sisters didn’t come back from a mission. It’s what he whispered to others, lost over the years, to battles and blasters and all the terrible wounds of war. 

It’s what he whispers to himself when the darkness is all too close and the waters of Scarif pound against his skull. 

“What’s that mean?” 

He stands, his legs shaking. “Come on.” Cassian leads her again, out to an observation station, on the edge of the base. It’s not manned currently, so he pulls a chair up to the viewing port. It’s old technology, this electro-macroscope, but it’s good enough to monitor for the First Order’s ships… and for him to visit the memory of old friends.

“You remember when Operative Winter brought you here?” he asks softly. “How she told you about Alderaan? Her home?”

“The planet that got ‘spolded,” Rose says, nodding solemnly.

Cassian punches coordinates into the scope. “Look there.” 

Rose leans in. “Just a star. What’s it?”

“See the little green blot?” He asks. She nods. “That’s Alderaan.”

“But it’s gone!”

“It’s lightyears from us. The light lives on.”

“Magiiiiic” she whispers.

It’s science, but not a topic he knows how to explain to a child. “The planet is there, see? Just out of reach, but always there.” He shows her then, the planets from his stories. Some, like Fest, exist, though not in a way that they once had. Others, like Jedha, like Scarif, are gone forever. 

It’s enough to make his own eyes sting, and he turns away, blinking hard. 

He doesn’t expect to feel her tiny hand pat his old, callused one. “It okay, Mister Andor. It okay to cry.”

It’s not. Not for him. But the ache of loss is there still. And perhaps always will be. “Thank you, Rose.”

She smiles. “I’ll fix it.” 

Fix what? He knows better than to ask. She’s a child. Intelligent, certainly, but not capable of fixing the past any more than he’s capable of sprouting wings and flying away from here. 

“You thinkin’ bout your friends?” she asks, looking up at him. “The soldiers an’ the people an’ an’ Kay-tu! He’s my favorite.”

“He was my favorite too,” Cassian admits. “My best friend.”

Rose nods, as solemn of a five-year-old as he’s ever seen. “He’s starlight now, though, right?”

Cassian smiles, for a moment, a rare sight on a solemn old man’s face. “So he is.”

“And you’ll tell me more stories about him?”

“I will.”

And he does. The year passes. Rose and Paige are sent to another base. Cassian stays on his outpost. Time passes, each year making him more grey, more tired, more stubbornly insistent on helping the Resitance.

And one day, years and years from that, the MacroScope shows an incoming ship. A familar, legendary ship. Cassian has more questions than he has in years, but the roar of a Wookiee into the base’s communication channel is more than enough proof that the ship is the one he thought it might be.

But he’s heard enough to know that the Falcon has a new captain, and a new crew.

What he hasn’t heard, though, is that Rose Tico is among them.

She runs off the ship and tackles him in a hug. “Easy!” he shouts, because he is far from young, and his non-durastreel hip is just as bad as the mechanical one these days. 

“Sorry, sorry,” she says. “It’s just… you’re still here!”

“So I am.” 

“I’ve got someone who was looking for you.” She says. She’s older now, but she’s still a kid to him. A kid he’s deeply proud of all the same. 

He thinks he should tell her that, thinks he should greet the other young people on the ship, and most certainly should say something to Poe Dameron. That he does manage, barking out, “I wore that hairstyle first!”

Poe just winks at him. “I learn from the best.”

Cassian shakes his head. Starts to welcome the others to the base, when the sound of pistons and gears stop his words… and nearly his heart. Behind the young heroes, a droid appears.

A familiar, impossible droid.

One head and shoulders taller than them. One made of shades of night and the past and the darkness he only sees in his dreams. One with optics that glow like Fest’s sunlight on snow.

One that…

“How…?” Cassian asks Rose.

“We found a backup of his hard drive. Been looking for parts. Finally finished…”

“My right shoulder joint is not complete, Rose Tico.” The voice says.

It’s a voice he knows anywhere. It’s a voice he thought he’d never hear again. The droid pivots his gaze down, sizing him up. He says one word and it’s everything. “Cassian.”

“Hello, Kaytu.”

Rose smiles. She had, somehow, found a way to fix him. Found a way to win the smallest bit of peace in a messy, broken galaxy. Because that’s what they all do, Cassian realizes. They’re all trying their best to save the day, to fix what’s broken, to win a better tomorrow.

They are in the end, all starlights, and all stories.


End file.
